Relationships between Admission Channels and Medical Career Fitness of Medical Students in Their Third Year

Medical environment in Taiwan has become more and more harsh and severe, so that issues like admission channels, stress coping, and professional counseling of medical students are highlighted. The present proposal will explore the relationship between admission channels and the performances of the medical students in the third year, and try to answer the following two questions: 1) Which admission channel could recruit the most suitable medical students, who are well-adapted, with high academic performance, teamwork ability, and humanistic spirit? 2) How to increase students’ willingness toward seeking professional counseling resources? For example, students might actually seek help from Student Counseling Center to further understand their strengths and weaknesses for a better career decision. We hypothesize that students enrolled via recommendation would have higher physician empathy, “love and care,” psychological resilience, stress coping, and academic performance; and their teamwork cooperation, class involvement would be also better according to observations from teachers and classmates. We will invite 165 medical students in their third year at a medical university in north Taiwan to participate our study in September, 2017, and provide them preliminary feedback reports and suggestions in the end of semester. In so doing, we infer that they will not only reply questionnaires truthfully, but also have higher willingness toward seeking help from Student Counseling Center to discuss issues such as stress coping, time management, career planning, specialty selection, etc. The expected contribution of this study includes: providing evidence-based results for Academic Affair Office to adjust quota of each admission channel, improving personal interview techniques or group discussion procedures, and increasing student’s willingness toward seeking professional help.